Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:48 pm on 27 June 2023.
Mark Drakeford
Labour
1:48,
27 June 2023
I notice that when it suits the Leader of the Opposition to compare what happens in Wales and England, he does so at every opportunity, and the minute I point out something else to him, he tells me he's not interested in what happens elsewhere—he wants to focus on what happens in Wales. So, let's focus on what's happening in Wales for a moment. As I've said to him, those long waits are falling—they are falling in in-patients and they are falling in out-patients. Diagnostic waits and therapy waits continued to fall, particularly in therapy waits, last month. And the median time—the standard time—it takes to be treated in the Welsh NHS, from the minute your doctor refers you to the minute your treatment is concluded, is 20 weeks. That is the standard experience of a Welsh patient: from the minute they are referred to the minute their treatment is over, it takes 20 weeks.
That's why, when the Member always comes here to talk down the NHS, to tell us that there's nothing good he can find to say about it, it does not resonate in the experience of people who rely on the NHS, who know how hard people are working and who know how exhausted our staff are from the enormous demands that they have faced in recent times. The Welsh Government backs them; it backs them with investment, it backs them by resolving pay disputes without the strikes that we have seen in England and will continue to see in England, and it does so by having a commitment to that service that only a Labour Government will ever provide.
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